Coulrophobia --- What are we really scared of?

Chronogical Blog Entries:

Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2016 21:58:53 +1100

Coulrophobia may be a recent neologism but it is a fairly well established
theme in horror and modern fiction, many of them documented in the Wikipedia
entry.

In your bloggers most humble opinion the root cause of this "phobia" is
the grease-paint and prostheses that clowns traditionally adopt to create
exaggerated features and facial expressions. Humans often find false facial
expressions "creepy".

Although for some people (such as your humble blogger) false or extremely
exaggerated expressions may appear more comical than creepy. Your blogger must
admit that he has never suffered from coulrophobia, and as a child, was not
adverse to reading sci-fi and horror, and not phobic about snakes, spiders or
creepy-crawlie things

What one person may find creepy, another may find fascinating or amusing.
Although, one of the things that many people do find a little "creepy" are
(modern) CGI depictions of human characters. And that's because they are too
realistic. ... Early attempts at CGI were easy for most people to cope with.
The depictions were obviously computer generated and audiences had no problem
with them. However the number of computations involved in creating the images
has grown exponentially and these have become increasingly realistic. Modern
CGI creations can have realistic beads of sweat, hair that ripples precisely
in the wind, facial muscles and eye movements that give an accurate simulation
of human emotions ... And yet the finely tuned human eyes of the audience
detect something wrong. And hence the CGI creations appear "creepy" ... Your
blogger would hazard a guess that this why CGI characters have mainly been
confined to "The Genre" (whatever that means these days).

The above also has implications for synthetic humans (androids).

Nevertheless there are many children (and adults) who find (the obviously
exaggerated features of) clowns disturbing and/or frightening. And this unease
has been pumped up by pop culture. The Epitome of the killer clown would be
Stephen King's IT and the DC comic character, The Joker ... And of course
Heath Ledger deserves an honourable mention here. His depiction of the
ultimate killer clown has been immortalised by his premature death. The
current wave of scary clowns is tapping into this rich vein of pop culture and
modern urban folklore. And as such your blogger must opine that it is, at
best, an ill-advised prank that has the potential to backfire with tragic
consequences for both the perpetrator(s) and intended victim(s).

The current "fear of clowns" story, which has been doing the rounds in
Australia has been pumped up even further by the media. This was all summed up
neatly in the ABC program "Media Watch" on Monday night, as mostly due to lazy
journalists recycling videos from the Internet without doing even basic fact
checking

Although, when discussing scary clowns, it's difficult to avoid mentioning
Donald Trump in the very next if not the same sentence ... It's certainly
uppermost in the minds of folks in the social media realm ... And would it be
cruel but fair for your blogger to suggest that it is and will continue to
back-fire for "The Donald"? Try googling for "Donald Trump scary clown" and
you'll find over a million matches. We might conclude therefore that the
current Scary Clown phenomenom will end sometime after November the 8th, 2016
(Or maybe it will get worse if US voters don't pull back from brink?)

There is an associated theme that deserves a mention ... And this is
unease about children and things associated with children. Horror themes that
develop along these lines will take the seemingly innocent child or the games
that children play and present them as sinister or menacing. In this regard,
Stephen King, the old master of modern fears, delivers many examples in his
first short story collection (Nightshift) and of course novels such as "Fire
Starter", "The Shining" etc. It is another interesting theme and not the same
as pedophobia, because it is not so much the fear of children and/or infants
as the feeling that there may be something (inherently) sinister about them.
If could be a misogynistic association of children and motherhood, or it could
be an association with "original sin" (i.e. we are all fundamentally flawed
and children especially because they are closer to the fundamental human
nature --- whatever that may be).